Visual Language Lab

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New paper: Not so secret agents

I’m excited to announce a new paper, “Not so secret agents: Event-related potentials to semantic roles in visual event comprehension,” in the journal Brain and Cognition. This paper was done during my time in the lab of my co-author, Marta Kutas, and collaborating with my friend from grad school, co-author Martin Paczynski. This paper is a…
New paper: A picture is worth more words over time

I’m excited to announce we have another new paper, “A picture is worth more words over time: Multimodality and narrative structure across eight decades of American superhero comics,” now out in the journal Multimodal Communication. This paper examines the changes in text-image relations and storytelling in American superhero comics from the 1940s though the 2010s.…
New paper: What’s your neural function, narrative conjunction?

I’m excited to announce that my new paper “What’s your neural function, narrative conjunction: Grammar, meaning, and fluency in sequential image processing” is now out in the open access journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. This study was co-authored by Marta Kutas, who was my advisor while I was a postdoctoral fellow at UC San…
Tourist traps in comics land*: Unpublished comics research

In a series of Twitter posts, I recently reflected on the pitfalls of various comics research that hasn’t been published. Since I think it contains some valuable lessons, I’m going to repeat and expand on them here… Though I’ve written the most about psychological studies about how people understand comics, other people have been doing…
New paper: When a hit sounds like a kiss

I’m excited to announce that I have new paper out in the journal Brain and Language entitled “When a hit sounds like a kiss: an electrophysiological exploration of semantic processing in visual narrative.” This was a project by the first author Mirella Manfredi, who worked with me during my time in Marta Kutas’s lab at…
New paper: Drawing the Line…in Visual Narratives

I’m happy to announce that we have a new paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition entitled “Drawing the Line Between Constituent Structure and Coherence Relations in Visual Narratives.” This was my final project at project at Tufts University, and was carried out by my former assistant…
2016: My Publications in Review

As 2016 nears its close, I thought I should do a post reflecting on all the research I’ve released with my colleagues over the past year. This was my biggest year of publishing yet, so I thought it would be good to just go over what we came out with. First off, in January, Bloomsbury…
New paper: Pow, punch, pika, and chu

I’m once again excited to announce the publication of another of my students’ projects. Our paper, “Pow, Punch, Pika, and Chu: The Structure of Sound Effects in Genres of American Comics and Japanese Manga” is now published in the latest issue of Multimodal Communication. This was another paper derived from student projects in my 2014…
New paper: The changing pages of comics

I’m excited to announce the publication of our latest paper, “The changing pages of comics: Page layouts across eight decades of American superhero comics” in the latest issue of Studies in Comics. This was a student project undertaken by the first author, Kaitlin Pederson, from my 2014 class the Cognition of Comics. She analyzed how…
New paper: Meaning above the head

I’m happy to announce that our new paper, “Meaning above the head” is now published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology! This one explores the structure of “upfixes” which are the class of visual signs that float above character’s heads, like lightbulbs or hearts. In my book, The Visual Language of Comics, I made a…